Search engines have become the epitome of the Internet and web-browsers. It’s hard to imagine how the web experience would have changed if there had been no search engines. We often take it for granted, some even perceive this as a part of a browser’s functionality and cannot tell which engine they actually use for searching.

Without a search engine, you have to insert the exact web address into your browser’s address tab to enter the site. This seems to be a great hurdle and something that can potentially drive users away from the web altogether. Fortunately, search engines were launched before the Internet went mainstream and henceforth became associated with it.

Monopoly?

The current state of affairs shows that Google, Yahoo and Bing are the most popular search engines in the US with Google being number one in the rest of the world. Started in 1996 by 2 PhD students, the Google search engine introduced a revolutionary search algorithm (for the time at least) which quickly moved Google to the top of the list.

We still use Google Search today because of the convenience and the search result relevance. There is however a strong tracking system that Google uses to remember what users search for in order to later build a profile on each. This isn’t very pleasant at all.

In this article, Privatoria offers to take a look at the top alternative search engines that do not track you.

Our first stop is probably the most widely known alternative search engine that is praised by many for zero tracking. The service is advertised as the one that respects user’s privacy and does no track users whatsoever. They will not remember your search history nor will they make a profile on you based on that, which, among other things, also means any user get identical results based on the same keyword.

It doesn’t use cookies so they won’t be able to tell whether two searches came from the same computer. All the logs are discarded from the server as well.

In case you prefer major search engine results but also want to preserve your privacy, try Ixquick. This company gathers search results from all of the major search engines and gives the results to their users. Basically, it serves as a third party between Google or Yahoo and the user. What the user gets out of it is anonymity. The search engine that the info is gathered from does not see the user’s IP address.

It can only see a bunch of requests from Ixquick, not the end user, essentially making the person who does the search anonymous to the main search engine.

This is the same company that runs Ixquick. The major difference is that the Startpage project has is that it only gathers search results from Google and not from all of the major search engines. The overall paradigm is similar to Ixquick and DuckDuckGo, meaning there’s no tracking or user logs. This results in complete user anonymity during the search stage.

You can also use their built-in Proxy feature that disables tracking on some of the websites you enter from the search page. This feature also disables Javascript for any website; which is a good thing in general but may cause problems with some reputable websites.

This is a relatively small player and offers the same functionality as IXquick. It gathers the search results from your search engines of choice and does not reveal your IP address. Therefore, your search results remain a part of the major ‘Disconnect’ profile making yourself untraceable. The solution currently able to gather results from Google, Yahoo, Bing and DuckDuckGo engines.

All of the above-mentioned search engines do their job just fine and can make your search anonymous. No one will know what you searched for. A specific website tracks you as you enter the landing page. It means they have all of the logs and history as well as your IP address, OS version, browser and possibly lots of other info.

Privatoria offers a solution to be completely anonymous on the web. Our VPN service encrypts 100% of your Internet traffic and hides your real IP, geographical location and other private things. Our VPN also covers all search engine websites so you can use Google or Yahoo and be anonymous to them.

The Internet will never be the same without search engines. That’s an indisputable fact. We all benefit from search engines everyday finding stuff we’re interested in quickly and hassle-free.

The security offered by popular search engines is questionable and users who are cautious about their private info may have to consider using safe search engines or a VPN to provide 100% web anonymity.

Nice Article
Europe has a new search engine startup named CENTIL-Europe. This search engine uses its own data-index and Web Spiders. CENTIL is startet 2 years ago Currently CENTIL is online in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. We will start in the next few months in English-speaking countries. Then centil will also be available in English. As our server is located in Switzerland, we are under the Swiss Internet law. User data are therefore as safe as in a safe deposit box. We use this information exclusively for internal purposes to improve our search.http://www.centil-europe.ch